Where Will I Sleep Tonight?

By Theodora Gurtlinger

There she thinks, the woman on a mission, what she sees and reads changes everything for these new lives. She wants you to know we are out there, and there is another way. Help is on the way. Do you feel stuck in your life? Looking for purpose? Take the journey. Take your life back. Be free from the situations that own you. This true story brought one woman, the ninth child of twelve, from a farm to the streets of New York City as a foster mother. The unique children that shared her home and love will bring tears and strength to those who are weak. Just know when you make the choice of life that you are never alone. This is the story of those who were the decided and the people who bring it to full circle. This book is for you. May we all find protection and inner peace. Her life once the leap was made changed uncertainties to advocacy and beyond. Once the choice of life was made, her work gladly began. Her life was now populated with smiles, cries, night calls, and play dates. Let's travel with her on this journey of birth to adoption. The book will take the uncertainties that dictate all our lives and place ourselves in his hands because he called this author to open her door. Many who knew her describes her as their rock and sounding board. If you needed something, she would be there for you. Her heart was as big as the ocean, which was seen with all the children she fostered and loved as her own. Compassion and acts of kindness are her hallmarks.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Nov 6, 2017
• ISBN: 9781641145343

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Where Will I

Sleep Tonight?

Theodora Gurtlinger

ISBN 978-1-64114-533-6 (Paperback)

ISBN 978-1-64114-534-3 (Digital)

Copyright © 2017 by Theodora Gurtlinger

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods without the prior written permission of the publisher. For permission requests, solicit the publisher via the address below.

Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.

296 Chestnut Street

Meadville, PA 16335

www.christianfaithpublishing.com

Printed in the United States of America

To the memory of my beloved father, who passed away on May 26, 1953, this book is fondly dedicated.

The Gurtlinger children dedicate this book to the 90 children and nuns in the Mary’s orphanage that perished in the 1900 hurricane Galveston Texas.

Preface

When I look back over the last thirteen years, during most of which I had one or more foster babies in my home, the feelings that come welling most irresistibly to the surface are those of love, satisfaction, pleasure, and pride. It is from this desire to share these with others, in a small way, that I have written this book. My hope is that it might encourage others to do what I have done.

Through these pages, in addition to the babies, one can read about my family, my friends, many social workers, and mothers of various sorts and persuasions, from the once-devious Jean to the lonely and courageous woman who had given her daughter up for adoption some twelve years before. They all tell part of the story.

There were times when the emotional problems inherent in giving up the babies were so great that I did not feel I could do it anymore. At such times, I turned to our Lord for encouragement and brought home more babies. Today, in spite of all the pain and sorrow, I can say too that there was also joy and a deep abiding satisfaction that I had been called. To me was given the Heaven-sent opportunity vouchsafed to few—to help the helpless. What more could anyone ask?

Chapter I

Introduction

I have heard it said that there is nothing that comes onto the earth so helpless as the human infant. Foals and calves are awkward, gangly, and long of leg, but they are usually standing up within an hour of their birth and within a day can run from danger, should it feel threatened. Puppies and kittens can crawl about, can sense their mother’s presence and creep to her for food. But the human baby can do none of these things. Indeed, it is many years before a child can hope to survive without an adult help and protection—in short, without parental love.

Yet babies are human beings—a being completely dependent, tiny bits of living matter. They are fashioned (we have been told) in God’s image. How, then, is it possible for them to come into the world undesired and unwanted, to be abandoned by their families, their very mothers to the mercies, not always tender care of others? In the thirteen years since I have been taking in foster children, thirty-one of these babies have come into my home, and I do not understand it any better now than I did when I began. And I don’t suppose I ever will. I gave every child the best I had to offer—my care and my wholehearted love. Every one, when the time for adoption came, left behind an aching, empty void, carefully stored with the pictures we took and kept so meticulously. They are all there, together in the album—my Rogues’ Gallery. In my heart and memory, caught in that last moment, I saw them as babies forever, the intervening years forgotten.

Without doubt, my distress at the plight of the unwanted is increased by my memories of my own childhood, so at variance with the lot of these helpless ones. I was the ninth of twelve children, and every one of us was loved and cared for. Looking back now, the years of my childhood seemed like an exquisite dream, the kind of thing that happens to people only in books. I suppose it didn’t seem so at the time, but in retrospect, our home appears to have been a sort of rural paradise, filled with the gentle pleasures of earlier, less complicated days.

My parents were of Polish descent, and in many ways, I suppose they could be called old-fashioned. They loved each other, and they loved us. We lived in a great old eighteen-room white house on eighteen acres of farmland in Sturbridge, Massachusetts, a pleasant old New England town. My father worked in the woolen mills not far away, and my mother somehow managed to do nursing to help out, without letting it interfere with her care of her large brood of children.

We grew most of our own fruits and vegetables in a large kitchen garden and orchard—potatoes, corn, apples, pears, and so on. And we raised our own animals and poultry—cows, horses, pigs, chickens, ducks, and turkeys. We all had our chores and were expected to pitch in and help, which we did.

Most of our chores had to be done after school and on Saturdays. Except for going to church, Sunday was devoted to prayer and rest. We would often walk the two and a half miles to worship, though sometimes Papa would hitch up the horse and wagon and provide us with transportation. The seasons followed one another with gentle regularity, each bringing its own sort of bounty. Life for the most part was warm and uneventful, though occasionally there were alarms and dangers. I particularly recall one haying time when Papa counted us off at dinner one night and found that my little brother Wallace was missing. We all scattered to the barn to dig frantically through the great piles of hay until we found him where he had fallen asleep and been buried alive. But God was generous to us, as it seemed he so often was, and Wallace escaped without harm. Fall was the time of preparing foodstuff for the winter. Everyone helped with applesauce, beans, chili sauce, pears, corn, sauerkraut, pickles, and so on. My uncles would come and help my father with slaughtering, so that the meat could be preserved. By the time all this was done, winter would be hard upon us. Chores were fewer and opportunities for fun would be greater. We searched about for higher and finer hills for our toboggans. Nights would find us tired by the fire, reading and popping corn. Neighbors were few and far between, but we had one another to play with and were not aware of loneliness or isolation.

Winter also brought school, which until we left the sixth grade, was only a quick scamper across the fields. After that, it meant a mile walk to get the school bus until we were out of high school.

I suppose my most vivid memory is of Christmas and of our vigil suppers. These were real family times, those wonderful Christmas Eves. Mama outdid herself each year with heaping plates of various kinds of fish and good things to eat. After prayer, we would go to the table—Papa at the head, Mama at the foot, the children in a double line by age down either side. We had a host, similar to that offered at communion, which was provided by our Polish parish every Christmas and which we made a traditional part of our vigil supper. Papa would take it first, and then it was passed to Mama, then to the eldest child and so on, down to the youngest one able to eat. The host was followed by a feast, and then we gathered around the fireplace for stories and hang Christmas stockings. Each stocking (I can still see the twelve of them hanging there) would get a toy—an orange, a banana, a candy cane, and a few nuts, as well as a couple of lumps of coal to remind us that our conduct was always open for improvement.

Childhood slides by and is irrevocably gone before one is even aware that it is passing. I graduated from high school in 1938 and went to work in the office of a local manufacturing plant. Though I wasn’t happy there—I wanted to be a hairdresser—I kept at it for three years until I was twenty-one. When I was twenty-one, I made the great break and left home to try to find my fortune in New York City, as so many other young people have done.

When I think of it now, I have to laugh. All the jokes and clichés one reads about the greenhorn from the sticks tackling the great city for the first time might have been written explicitly and exactly about me. My ears were ringing and my adrenalin was aroused from all of my mother’s good but terrifying advice. Off I went, weighted down with two hat boxes, three suitcases, and a loaf of homemade bread—all to be juggled on the bus. I even had money sewed inside my coat!

This was bad enough, but I managed to arrive in town right at the height of the rush hour. There, burdened as I was, I attempted my first subway ride. What it was like can probably be better imagined than described, especially by anyone who has ridden the New York subway at rush hour. As far as I am concerned, it is one of the worst experiences that life in New York has to offer. An unknown young man took pity on me, fortunately, and helped me with my bags right to my sister’s door. Otherwise, I would probably be riding the subways yet.

So I went to school and learned my trade, which I then plied in the city for perhaps a year. It was a good year.

I enjoyed living with my sister and her husband and helping with their baby, Paul. I enjoyed the city and meeting people, making friends, and continually learning more about hair styling as I worked.

But illness intervened. I was required to undergo surgery for appendicitis and decided to return home for it so that I would have Mother to look after me, which she did, royally. I was well spoiled by the time I was able to return to work. For a while I considered staying at home, but pay in the local shops was prohibitively little. Finally, I decided to return to the city, where I found a job and moved into a furnished apartment, which I shared with a good friend of mine, Mercedes.

These are the kind of choices that decide the direction of our lives, for I had not been back in the city for long when one of my sisters had me over for Sunday dinner and introduced me to Fred Gurtlinger. Our relationship got off to a rather rocky beginning: He promptly asked me to go out the following Sunday and then he didn’t appear. A few days later, he turned up on my doorstep full of apologies and still showing the effects of the sunburn and subsequent sun poisoning, which had kept him indoors that day. As I had no phone, there had been no way for him to let me know. We decided to try again the following Sunday, and after that we began to date frequently. Within six months, we were engaged. It was wartime, and Fred was planning to enlist in the navy, which he preferred to the army service, which would have been his lot if he had waited to be drafted. In the old-fashioned way, he wrote to my parents and asked for me, and they gave their consent to our marriage.

We were married December 19, 1945, in the Church of the Guardian Angel, by a young navy chaplain. Our wedding was well-endowed with nerves, as every wedding really should be—not only was it the first experience at marriage for the bride and groom, but for the priest as well. He had never married anyone before! In spite of this, we all survived in fairly good order. It was a lovely, simple service, and it gives me a great deal of pleasure to this day when I look back upon it. Not all of my family was able to attend, unfortunately, but my sister Frances and my brother-in-law stood up for us. And many of my friends and other sisters were there. After the reception, we were able to take advantage of Fred’s shore leave for a two-week honeymoon in Virginia.

We were more fortunate than many during the war years, for Fred spent his entire service period nearby. Every year he had another fifteen-day leave, which we spent in Virginia, repeating our honeymoon. Our more difficult times actually began in 1946, when he left the navy. Like many other veterans and his wife, we found the transition to civilian life a little difficult. Jobs were few and far between, and apartments (at least those that weren’t priced out of our market) were even more scarce. We lived with my mother-in-law for a year while we hunted determinedly for what would be our first true home. At the time, we were earning not quite $80 a week between us. Fred’s pay was just under $50, and I had a job in a beauty shop that paid $30.

Our patience was rewarded finally with a great find—a three-room apartment for $27 a month. Rentals like that seem hard to believe in these inflationary days. We were delighted with it, not least because I was expecting our first child in February 1947. He almost shared George Washington’s birthday—that was the day I was taken to the hospital, but the baby was actually born by Caesarian section on the morning of the twenty-fourth. It was a difficult time. I spent nine days in the hospital, then another two weeks at home with my sister Helen looking after the baby and me until I began to feel strong enough to do things for myself again. We baptized the baby Karl Francis at the church where we had been married.

Before Karl was a year old, I became pregnant again, and this time, things were even more difficult. In the last two months of my waiting time, I developed a toxic condition. When the little girl was delivered, again by C-section, it was July 23. It was one of the hottest days of the year. I was very miserable indeed. I was in the hospital for eleven days, and I was still sick when I went home. The incision did not heal properly, and it was a long time before I was really well again. I guess some of the time I had been in danger because a doctor told me once that it was a miracle that I had survived.

So Karl and the little girl—we named her Donna Elizabeth—were all the family we were to have (with thirty-one exceptions, though we didn’t know that then). For the most part, their growing-up time was uneventful, marked only by the various vicissitudes that are common to normally developing children. When Donna was about a year old, she began to walk, and we realized with some distress that she was quite pigeon-toed. A visit to an orthopedist resulted in a prescription for special high white shoes with a wedge inserted in a certain way by a shoemaker recommended by the shoe store. Since Donna wore the heels down on our poor pavements in about a week, it meant that once every seven days I was making a trip downtown for repairs. It was well worth the trouble. By the time she was three, she was able to wear regular oxfords with the wedge, and when she was four, she walked quite normally.

No sooner was she out of the woods with the foot problem than she began to have trouble with tonsils and adenoids. Every three weeks or so she would have a session with high fever, and her